Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 35 Years On: Is the ‘Text’, Once Again, Unattainable?
- 2 To Attain the Text. But Which Text?
- 3 Compounding the Lyric Essay Film : Towards a Theory of Poetic Counter-Narrative
- 4 ‘Every love story is a ghost story’ : The Spectral Network of Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog (2015)
- 5 Lines of Interpretation in Fields of Perception and Remembrance : The Multiscreen Array as Essay
- 6 Deborah Stratman’s The Illinois Parables (2016) : Intellectual Vagabond and Vagabond Matter
- 7 Rethinking the Human, Rethinking the Essay Film : The Ecocritical Work of The Pearl Button
- 8 Montage Reloaded: From Russian Avant-Garde to the Audiovisual Essay
- 9 ‘All I have to offer is myself’: The Film-Maker as Narrator
- 10 The Shudder of a Cinephiliac Idea? Videographic Film Studies Practice as Material Thinking
- 11 The Home Movie as Essay Film: On Making Memory Posthumously
- Index
9 - ‘All I have to offer is myself’: The Film-Maker as Narrator
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 35 Years On: Is the ‘Text’, Once Again, Unattainable?
- 2 To Attain the Text. But Which Text?
- 3 Compounding the Lyric Essay Film : Towards a Theory of Poetic Counter-Narrative
- 4 ‘Every love story is a ghost story’ : The Spectral Network of Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog (2015)
- 5 Lines of Interpretation in Fields of Perception and Remembrance : The Multiscreen Array as Essay
- 6 Deborah Stratman’s The Illinois Parables (2016) : Intellectual Vagabond and Vagabond Matter
- 7 Rethinking the Human, Rethinking the Essay Film : The Ecocritical Work of The Pearl Button
- 8 Montage Reloaded: From Russian Avant-Garde to the Audiovisual Essay
- 9 ‘All I have to offer is myself’: The Film-Maker as Narrator
- 10 The Shudder of a Cinephiliac Idea? Videographic Film Studies Practice as Material Thinking
- 11 The Home Movie as Essay Film: On Making Memory Posthumously
- Index
Summary
Abstract
Who precisely is the ‘I’ referenced in so many essay films’ voice-overs? It is easy to assume that it refers to the film-maker, but, even if the voice that we hear is the film-maker's own, an essay film's narrative ‘voice’ is always ambiguous. Starting from Chris Marker's contradictory claim in a letter about Sans Soleil (1983) that all he has to offer is himself, the chapter explores how the aspiration of open and direct address is complicated through the various mediations involved in film-making. With particular focus on my own film, Rohmer in Paris (2013), it raises the paradoxical possibility that essay film-makers can only offer themselves, but are prevented by the form of the essay film from doing so.
Keywords: essay film, reflexivity, documentary, narration, voice-over
Contrary to what people say, using the first person in films tends to be a sign of humility: “All I have to offer is myself.”’
‒ Chris MarkerWhenever we read a piece of non-fiction writing that begins with an ‘I’, it is fair to assume that the writer is referring to himself or herself. It is similarly fair to assume, whenever we hear the word ‘I’ in the voice-over of a non-fiction film, that, in the absence of contrary evidence, the voice is that of the film-maker. Yet, even if we are in fact hearing the filmmaker speak, the identity of this ‘I’ is typically more ambiguous than it seems. In this chapter, I look briefly at the slippery brilliance of the voice-over in Chris Marker's Sans Soleil (1983) and then reflect on the far less successful engagement with voice-over in my own film Rohmer in Paris (2013), focussing in particular on two questions: who is the ‘I’ referenced in an essay film's voice-over, and how is the narrator's identity affected by who is actually speaking the words? By recounting the trouble that these questions caused me, I hope to demonstrate how central both the constructed identity of the narrative ‘I’ and the actual identity of the person saying ‘I’ are to the underlying question of how to communicate thought processes in film.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Beyond the Essay FilmSubjectivity, Textuality and Technology, pp. 189 - 198Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020